Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Prog 6 - Dan Dare

The Thing has total control of the Odyssey and Dan, Monday and whats left of the landing party have been taken to the Biogs base. They are released from their captors stomach and now they face a welcoming committee of aliens that are identical to the 'Thing' that has taken control of the ship.
The creatures tell Dare and company their backstory. That they are a race of aliens called 'The Shepherds' and they live to serve their masters The Biogs. The Biogs lived on a planet called Zircon and The Shepherds on their moon. The Biogs grow their houses and machines from living tissue and they use live fuel to do this. When The Biogs conquered their race they made some of them slaves and the rest the Mother Biog turned into fuel. But sadly The Shepherds home planet can't produce enough fuel for them so they set up a new home on Jupiter and plan to use it as a base to take over the Earth and use humans as their fuel source.

Dare doesn't fancy being turned into fuel and insults The Biogs by calling them 'slimy bugs'. The Shepherds are deeply offended by this and they attack Dan. They're going to kill him. Dan fights back.
A Shepherd then attacks Dan with a Living Axe...
A Biog turns red and the Shepherd holds off his attack on Dare. The Biog is angry that the Shepherd is wasting fuel and the human must be taken to the Mother Biog and be 'converted'.

Monday sees his chance and runs the alien through with one of its own spears. Dan grabs the Living Axe and they decide to fight their way to freedom.
This wasn't too bad. Not any of the usual craziness of the past few episodes. Although a Living Axe is pretty wacky. Now we know why the 'Thing' was aboard the ship. It's trying to steer to ship to the Mother Biog so the human crew can be 'converted' to fuel.

The problem though is, in the first episode, the ship was broken apart and the humans seemed to be sucked down to the planet. Why didn't the Biogs do this with the Odyssey instead of beaming a Shepherd on board? Makes no sense to me.

Also, we have the usual cliched 'I'm going to tell you our whole backstory before we kill you' speech. Which is fine because 2000ad was a publication catering totally to young kids back then. Probably wouldn't fly to spill the whole can of beans in a couple of pages today though. Storytelling has gotten a little bit more complicated since then.

A fun episode and a definite improvement on what went before.

No comments: